- Fantastic attention on details, lots of great scenery and little environmental storytelling moments.
- The cinematics are really good, they set the tone quite well. The animation is perhaps a bit choppy here and there, but the artwork is beautiful.
- An overall amazing sound design (though I experienced some strange glitches a few times while being underwater).
- Great humor, lots of entertaining ideas - both in readables and in scripted NPC conversations.
- Very high level of polishedness, the map builders did an amazing and respectful work.

Writing an honest review is always an ungrateful task when the subject is a high effort high quality project. And The Black Parade is certainly one! I mean if I had to give the score based on my respect towards the authors for creating the campaign (and sharing it with the Thief community for free!), it was an instant 10/10 without any second thoughts... I have a handful of nitpicks as well though:

- Andy Bartmess voice acting is not really good as Humes, the protagonist (to be honest, I wasn't a fan of the Garrett imitations he's done for some TDM missions either). Andy has a really good voice for radio commercials, but it never really sounds natural to me for some reason. Here, he tries way too hard to sound gritty and bruting. I'd really love to hear a character portrayed with his everyday talking voice one day, but first, Thief and TDM fan mission creators have to finally stop asking voice actors to be Stephen Russell. Please.
- There are way too many overwritten readables, luckily the majority of them are optional and serve worldbuilding only. The problem is some of them are supposed to give you quite important clues.
- The campaign doesn't really add anything new to the Thief universe. The missions are top quality, but all of them are rather remixes of the most popular original and/or fan missions. I really respect all the effort that was put into the project, but considering this, it kinda feels like a missed opportunity. Especially knowing how much great talents worked together.
- I think the level designers went into pure evil territory with the mazelike layouts a couple of times. The second half of Where Old Faces Fade was quite the challenge, but around 1 hour into Death's Dominion was when I had to press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+END. It's a really well built map, but I think it has a lot of parts that felt like being there only for making the level more and more complex.

So far mission 2 and 5 were my favorites and I can't wait to finish the rest of the campaign (especially since the plot just started to become pretty interesting). Many thanks to everyone who participated in creating this amazing project!

As for your last point I had the opposite experience, the maps in M4 gave you nearly perfect information. I agree it was visually intimidating due to darkness and verticality, but navigation certainly wasn't a problem (or maybe I misunderstood your point). I completely agree it was needlessly large and dragged towards the end.

While not in a single sitting, I played the first 4 missions one after another, so I admit, there is a chance it was just some navigating fatigue of mine at that point. I definitely want to give that mission another shot after I finished the whole campaign.